The washing of high volumes of consumer items, particularly those that require regular washing, for example dishes and cutlery from food centres and airline catering, are conventionally washed by hand involving a highly labor intensive batch or continuous process. Such processes typically involve inefficient use of water with water consumption relatively high and on a per article basis extremely high. Despite this excessive water consumption, the inefficient water use may also lead to cross contamination, where food particles of a previous batch are insufficiently disposed of prior to the cleaning of the batch. It follows this represents a significant health risk.
More recently, automated processes have been adopted so as to solve the labor intensive aspect. In such systems, the articles are loaded into crates or baskets and passed through various stations via a conveyor belt, so as to systematically undergo rinsing, detergent washing and drying. Such an approach is also less water intensive with water management more controllable than the former manual method.
Nevertheless, cross contamination is still an issue as the conveyors and reusable baskets or crates may still carry food particles, or other such material, and so affect the cleanliness of subsequent batches.